The HTC One X ($199.99 with two-year contract) is a monster cell phone—and I mean that in a good way. It's AT&T's first Ice Cream Sandwich phone. We'll keep an eye on the imminent Samsung Galaxy III launch, but as of today—and despite a few minor issues we found during testing—the HTC One X takes its place atop the heap as the best Android smartphone in America. It's a worthy Editors' Choice on AT&T.

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Before I get started, a few words on HTC's product line: If you want this phone on Sprint, it's called the HTC EVO 4G LTE. Meanwhile, T-Mobile offers a slightly smaller variant called the HTC One S ($199.99, 4.5 stars), which lacks the high-definition screen and LTE support, but hits T-Mobile's own HSPA+ 42 data network, which is quite fast on its own, and is also more battery efficient.

Design and Voice QualityAvailable in dark gray or white, the HTC One X measures 5.30 by 2.75 by 0.36 inches (HWD) and weighs a light 4.60 ounces. It's very well built, with top-quality plastic around the back and sides with a nicely textured matte finish. I did miss the gradient anodized aluminum housing on the HTC One S, though. A prominent silver ring surrounds the camera lens on the back, and protrudes slightly, just enough that the phone tilts a bit when sitting flat on a table.

One of the biggest draws to the One X is its massive, 4.7-inch, 1280-by-720-pixel glass capacitive display. It's gorgeous in every sense of the word, with beautiful color, bright whites, and deep blacks. It's even unusually resistant to reflections. Typing on the on-screen keyboards is a breeze in both portrait and landscape mode.

The One X is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), tri-band HSPA+ 21 (850/1900/2100 MHz), and single-band LTE (700MHz) handset with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. The phone posted blistering 4G LTE speeds, averaging 33-37Mbps down and 11-15Mbps up in our tests in New York City. Sometimes the back of the phone became quite warm with LTE running full blast, but otherwise it stayed cool. Voice quality was excellent overall, with a warm, clear tone in the earpiece, and crisp, dropout-free transmissions through the microphone. I did hear a slight computerized sound on voices through the mic at times, but reception was solid.

Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars), although voice dialing doesn't work over Bluetooth, which is a pesky and unnecessary limitation. The speakerphone got very loud, but sounded tinny; at least it didn't distort heavily. Battery life was solid, at 9 hours and 9 minutes of talk time while connected to LTE.

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Hardware, OS, and HTC Sense 4The next-gen, 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and 1GB of RAM power the One X to blazing speeds. At first glance, the quad-core chip included in the overseas version of the One X would have been even more welcome here, since it's pushing almost twice the number of pixels than the same CPU in the HTC One S over on T-Mobile. But the Qualcomm chip's dual core, A15-like Krait on 28 nanometer silicon stacks up nicely next to the Tegra 3's quad-core A9, 40-nanometer CPU.

Our benchmark tests didn't reveal any weaknesses either, aside from slight drop-offs on Nenamark2 and BrowserMark (by 5 percent and 8 percent, respectively) when compared with the One S. The results were still very fast across the board, proving that Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 chip scales up quite nicely to handle the extra pixels. It's also about 15 percent faster than the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket ($149.99, 4.5 stars) and 25 percent faster than the HTC Vivid ($99.99, 4 stars).

Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) (4 stars) is on board, along with HTC Sense 4, a lighter version of the company's earlier UI overlay that doesn't mess with the built-in apps quite as much as before. There are seven home screens you can customize and swipe between. E-mail conversations are threaded, and HTC's rather nice clock and weather widgets also pop up a Google Earth-style globe for tracking time and weather around the world. You can switch between tasks using a nifty sliding tile view, as if they were albums in a jukebox. In testing, the One X felt extremely responsive, with none of the occasional stutters and hiccups I've experienced with other dual-core Android phones.

Other nice features: HTC adds a Car Mode, which displays a beautiful landscape home screen with large icons for easy access while behind the wheel. This includes the free Google Maps Navigation, as well as icons for making calls, streaming Internet radio, and calling up music tracks stored on the phone. The One X is also packed with several larger-screen media-viewing options, including integrated DLNA, HDMI wireless support, and HTC's own Media Link protocol, which lets you flick photos and videos (but not games) over to a big screen, provided you have HTC's Media Link receiver. We've been testing a preproduction version of the HTC Media Link, and so far, it only works sporadically; we'll withhold judgment until we see a final version and price.

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Jamie Lendino is the Editor-In-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor In Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also appeared in the print editions of Popular Science, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision,...
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